Activities and affiliations

Military command Czechoslovakia Communism 1895–1979 ○ Natural causes

A national hero of two world wars who became an unlikely last bastion of the Prague Spring

In Moscow in August 1968, when Brezhnev demanded he install a 'workers'-peasants' government,' Svoboda replied that he would put a bullet in his own head unless Dubček and the reformist leaders were released.

A World War I veteran who deserted the Austro-Hungarian army for the Czechoslovak Legion, Svoboda organized the 1st Czechoslovak Army Corps in the USSR during World War II and emerged a national hero, liberating his homeland from the east. As Minister of Defense, he declared in February 1948 that 'the army will not march against the people,' enabling the Communist takeover, only to be purged and spend the 1950s imprisoned and in obscurity. Elected president in March 1968 on Dubček's recommendation, he consented to the Prague Spring reforms; after the Warsaw Pact invasion that August, he flew to Moscow and threatened to shoot himself in Brezhnev's presence unless the kidnapped reform leaders were freed. During normalization he passively acquiesced to the muzzling of the press and Dubček's removal, remaining in office until a constitutional provision forced him out in 1975.

Diplomacy and international organization Czechoslovakia Communism 1902–1952 ✕ Executed

Slovak Communist who succeeded Jan Masaryk as foreign minister and was executed after the Slánský trial of 1952

As deputy foreign minister, he backed rejection of the Marshall Plan; after the 1948 coup he became foreign minister and organized Czechoslovak air support for Israel. Forced out and arrested in 1950, he was executed after the 1952 Slánský trial.

A lawyer from Tisovec in Slovakia, he was a left-wing intellectual who co-edited Dav, a cultural and political journal of great influence among interwar Slovak intellectuals. He sat as a Communist deputy. He became foreign minister after Jan Masaryk’s death in March 1948 and served until 1950. Accused of “Titoism” and “national deviation”, he was sentenced to death at the Slánský trial of 1952 and executed on 3 December; he was later rehabilitated.